IMAGE DETAILS

Galerie Alexis Pentcheff

Pierre Bonnard (Fontenay-aux-Roses 1867-1947 Le Cannet)
Promenade à Paris, circa 1911
Oil on canvas
40 x 60 cm
Estate stamp lower left
Provenance: collection of Pierre and Marie-Françoise Vernon
Literature: Dauberville Jean et Henry, Bonnard, Vol. IV, Paris, Bernheim-Jeune, 1974, repr. p. 312 under n° 01992
Exhibitions: Pierre Bonnard, A. Tooth & Sons, London, 17 June-12 July 1969, repr. in exh. cat. n° 8; Matisse e Bonnard. Viva la pittura!, Rome, 2006, repr. in exh. cat. (ed. Skira) p. 340 under n° 125; Bonnard, Le Cannet, une évidence, Musée Bonnard, Le Cannet, 2020, repr. in exh. cat. p. 42

The creation of this work by Pierre Bonnard reminds us that the artist was also a photographer, experimenting with daring compositions. Though his painting captures the fleeting moment, it shares little with the tentative realism of early photography. Made entirely of color and sensation, it constructs a fragile world of subtle harmony.

Just before embracing the South - before letting the Mediterranean light burst into color across his canvases - Bonnard explored a quieter, more muted sensuality in the early 1910s, while working in a studio in Paris, not far from the avenue depicted here. The “very Japanese Nabi,” as his friends from the group of his youth liked to call him, knew how to let color whisper on the canvas, how to conjure the intimacy of a letter.

On one side of the painting, cool tones — blues and violets placed side by side - contrast with the russet hues of this autumnal Parisian avenue, bringing to the foreground, beneath a hat bathed in light like a reinvented halo, the lowered face of a woman reading. Her eyes are hidden, absorbed in the text. Though she has removed her gloves, she surely no longer feels the sharp chill of that November afternoon…

Elegant silhouettes glide through the landscape; yet they endure — along with this hat-wearing heroine - on our retinas and in our memories, as companions to a shared intimacy, lasting only the time it takes to read a love letter.

Unseen on the art market since the 1960s, this painting has been shown in several museum exhibitions, the most recent in 2020 at the Musée du Cannet, dedicated to the artist.